Off

Unstable Design Lab

As HCI continues to integrate craft techniques into its repertoire, tensions have emerged between what is new and known—knowledge that resides in communities and histories rather than individuals—and how to transfer between the written word and material know-how. The researchers explored those tensions through the process of writing and instructing. The project's goal is two fold: first, to help HCI understand the potential that a deep understanding of weave structures can hold for advancing the HCI field, and second, to explore how a pictorial might support formats that have long been used for communicating craft knowledge.

Publication

Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck, and Etta Sandry. 2022. An Introduction to Weave Structure for HCI: A How-to and Reflection on Modes of Exchange. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 629-642. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3534567 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention Award].
 

Off

Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU Boulder’s Graduate school on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.

Ellen Yi-Luen Do, professor of computer science and director of the ACME Lab, and Carson Bruns, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of the  Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, were both honored for outstanding contributions to mentoring individual graduate students and the quality of their interactions with them.

Their nomination materials showcased their many contributions in mentoring graduate students and supporting the mission of graduate education, while supporting their students’ career development and individual growth.

Carson Bruns
Bruns’ research focuses on emergent nanomaterials—engineering matter at the smallest of scales to create materials with particular properties. His group has received wide recognition for its work on “smart tattoos," which have the potential to impart new properties to skin.
 
Jesse Butterfield, an ATLAS-affiliated PhD candidate and alumnus of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, said that Bruns regularly comes up with “brilliant ideas for impactful scientific work.” One such idea—the use of invisible tattoo inks to protect skin from UV light and the cancers it causes—forms the backbone of Butterfield’s PhD studies.
 
“He spends more time with his grad students than any other advisor that I’m aware of, and with some of them by orders of magnitude,” Butterfield said. “He gives each of us his full attention.”
 
Bruns always pushes his students to work on their career goals, even when it slows progress within the lab, Butterfield adds, including when two students wanted to take time out to intern with companies of interest, and when Butterfield wanted to teach an undergraduate class. 
 
Butterfield said Bruns’ kindness has been unwavering since they began working together in 2017.  “I give the strongest recommendation possible for awarding Carson, in large part due to his capabilities and strengths in his work, but also for his personal qualities, which allow him to continuously raise up the people around him. He is one of those rare people who constantly makes those around him better.”
 

Ellen Yi-Luen Do
In Ellen Do’s ACME Lab, students are engaged in a wide range of projects, from alternative game control, to immersive musical jam sessions, to robotics for wellness, to visual analytics, toys to promote child development and generative art.
 
Despite the breadth of their work, she tells her nine PhD and two master’s students that she is always available: “only an email or door away.”
 
And on any given day, the ACME Lab is a busy central hub, buzzing and flowing with undergraduate and graduate students, says ATLAS PhD Student Sandra Bae. “Ellen has cultivated a lab culture where her students warmly welcome any student interested in research to join our weekly lab meetings, directly mentor undergraduate or master’s students for their capstone projects or simply invite others to socialize. She understands the importance of a social support system where the lab functions as a family.”
 
Bae points out that Do is excellent at harnessing and directing the interests of her students. “Her mentoring strength comes from how observant she is,” says Bae. 
 
“As a PhD advisee of Ellen’s, her influence is imprinted on my life,” Bae said. “She is my academic mentor, who listened to my first conference presentation five times in a row; my senior, who taught me how to treat friends and myself with compassion; my spiritual leader, who motivates me with her delightful energy; my personal role model, who helps me, another Asian-American woman, be more confident that I belong and can succeed in academia.”

Fiona Bell, ATLAS PhD student, member of the Living Matter Lab; Dissertation Completion Fellowship, (one academic semester of financial support).

Carson Bruns, assistant professor, ATLAS Institute & Mechanical Engineering; Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award.

Ellen Yi-Luen Do, professor, ATLAS Institute & Computer Science; Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award.

Sasha de Koninck, PhD candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance, member of the Unstable Design Lab; Graduate School Summer Fellowship ($6,000); Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant ($1,000).

Varsha Koushik, PhD'22, Computer Science, member of the Superhuman Computing Lab; First-place, Three-Minute Thesis Competition Winner.

Anthony Pinter,  PhD'22, Information Science, ATLAS lecturer and incoming teaching assistant professor; Second-place, Three-Minute Thesis Competition winner.

Purnendu, ATLAS PhD student; Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant ($1,000).

Off

, a researcher with the ATLAS Institute's , an artist, and an Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance PhD student, takes a different approach: She creates “future heirlooms,” garments made for others with the idea they will preserve them for future use.

To do this, participants describe to her a scene they envision in their future, such as walking to the same park every day.

They describe what the park will smell like and what they will see and hear, as well as the characteristics of the garment, such as being resilient to four seasons or being small enough to fold into a backpack. 

Based on the description, de Koninck designs and creates a “future heirloom,” with traditional textile techniques such as quilting, patchwork and embroidery, in combination with technical and novel materials. 

With the leftover materials from each future heirloom, de Koninck makes a quilt, which then becomes the lab's future heirloom; the garments are sent to their recipients.

“We do not want to assume what technology will look like in a time we cannot imagine, and so we work with tools and materials that we already have,” de Koninck says. “An antique heirloom is a reflection of the time it was created in; so is a future heirloom.”

Rather than a used object preserved to be handed down, Future Heirlooms are meant to be used up, and worn out, much like the antique heirlooms, de Koninck adds. But instead of then preserving them again, they are to be repaired, refashioned or recycled. The future heirloom’s technical purpose does not end when the material wears away, de Koninck says.

"We are living in uncertain times, some might even say, ambiguous times," she says.  "The Internet of Things is evolving into the Internet of Disposable Things. Our technology is becoming smaller and cheaper to produce. We are creating so much waste, and have no way of processing it."

De Koninck presented her future heirloom project, The Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology, at the "Making and Doing" exhibition at the 4S hybrid conference, held Oct. 6-9, both in Toronto and virtually. She will also present her project as part of the Responsible Fashion Series, a hybrid conference to be held at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, Oct. 20-22.

In March de Koninck hosted a virtual “Future Heirlooms Workshop” at the Textiles from Home: Local Crafts, Global Conversations Conference. During the workshop, participants worked with materials to create a future textile heirloom to be used for a specific future moment. 
 

Off

Sasha de Koninck, an Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance PhD student and a member of the Unstable Design Lab, will host a virtual “Future Heirlooms Workshop” at the Textiles from Home: Local Crafts, Global Conversations Conference on March 17, 3-5 p.m. MDT. During the workshop, participants will work with materials around them to create a future textile heirloom to be used for a specific future moment. Textiles from Home is a project of the Design Studies Department and the Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and conference presentations focus on connections between textile making, domestic space, and local environments, historically and now. The conference includes sessions on “such of-the-moment crazes” as artful mending, embroidery, women in fiber mills and Scottish wool.

Off